Thursday, 10 November 2005

Are “creation” and “nature” synonyms? I have suggested before that they are in fact very different concepts, and that an interchangeable use of these terms is a category mistake. Now a sophisticated article in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion addresses this problem in detail, and argues for a proper distinction between the concepts of “creation” and “nature.” Here are the details:

W. David Hall, “Does Creation Equal Nature? Confronting the Christian Confusion about Ecology and Cosmology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73:2 (2005), 781-812.